K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [37]
Needless to say, this was incredibly slow and tedious. After a while, however, we found the uppermost willow wand. Now, when I belayed Charley, he would sweep back and forth at the end of the rope until he found the next wand. It was here that those humble green garden stakes saved our lives. By 1:00 P.M., we had reached Camp III. We wanted to push on down to Camp II, and since there were fixed ropes all the way from III to II, Scott, Charley, and I decided to go ahead, break trail, and prepare camp for Rob and Gary.
Rappelling the fixed lines was a lot easier and safer than downclimbing the steep slopes above Camp III. The three of us got to Camp II at 5:00 P.M.; Gary and Rob arrived three hours later. Weakened by his illness, Gary had abandoned his pack, containing all his gear, somewhere above, so Scott and I gave him one of our sleeping bags (we had left a second bag at Camp II). Once again the two of us cuddled underneath a single sleeping bag in a half-collapsed tent. It was a miserable night, but knowing we were slowly descending into richer air gave us strength and hope.
Each day after we’d summited, the weather got worse and worse. This mountain just did not want to let us go. It was almost as if we now had to pay some sort of toll for having stood on her summit. Had we not had to help Gary get down the mountain, we could have moved fast, but now we were confronted with a moral responsibility that none of us could ignore. We would all go down together.
By the next morning, Gary was in really bad shape. Only marginally aware of what was going on, he pleaded with us to leave him there to die. Scott yelled at him, “We’re not leaving you! Get your shit together!”
It took six hours on August 18 to get Gary down to Camp I, even though we now had him breathing supplemental oxygen. He was so weak that we had to unclip and reclip his figure-eight device from each fixed rope. The snow and wind pummeled us relentlessly. At Camp I, Gary completely collapsed. I quickly erected the bivy tent Scott and I had spent our nights in at Camp IV, then sat inside it as I cradled Gary in my lap and monitored his symptoms. His breathing was rapid and shallow, and he was coughing up blood and green phlegm, some of which splattered onto the tent walls. “He looks 90 years old and ready to die,” I wrote in my diary.
Blessedly, Jonathan Pratt and Dan Mazur had climbed up to Camp I to help out. They administered fresh oxygen to Gary, but it didn’t do much good. He could no longer stand, let alone climb down under his own steam. Eventually the Swedes arrived to lend a hand. Spurred on by the fear of losing Gary, we pushed through the night, wearing headlamps as we lowered and slid our completely helpless partner down the slopes below Camp I. We reached advance base camp, at the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge, only at midnight. From there the Swedes and Mexicans took over, while Scott, Charley, and I stumbled on down to base camp, arriving at 3:00 A.M. We had been on the move for twenty hours straight.
The next day, a helicopter picked up Rob and Gary and flew them to Islamabad. Gary slowly recovered, first in a Pakistani hospital, then back home in New Zealand. He had survived K2 by the skin of his teeth.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more physically or emotionally exhausted in my life than after that climb and descent. But finally I could relax and begin to savor the joy of accomplishment. “What an epic!” I wrote in my diary on August 19. “But we’re done! Alive! Summited!